The Incredible Shrinking Game?

I agree that prolonging a game past its novelty doesn’t benefit anyone. That said, 4 hours sounds extremely short to me. Are there really 60 dollar games that brief? For me, I need to enjoy a game for about 15 hours to not feel like I wasted my money if I buy it at full price. Due to this, I generally pick up role playing and strategy games on release day and let action games hit the bargain bin before I try them. This is no doubt partially due to me being a broke college student, however.

Those completion stats seem pretty surprising (read: suspect) to me. It has 67% getting the achievement for finishing Mass Effect 2 with an average time played at 12.4 hours versus 7.9% completion of Red Dead with an average play time of 17.3 hours? Granted, Red Dead had multiplayer which would have contributed nothing towards completion, but come on. Red Dead’s multiplayer was pretty pants.

I don’t mind a short, complete game for a small, reasonable price. A $60 AAA title that is 6-8 hours of gameplay is ridiculous on its own, and if two or three of those hours are backtracking across the same maps? Please. If it’s something like Bad Company 2 – which is primarily meant to be a multiplayer experience – I can deal with an abbreviated single player game.

I mean, ok, every game doesn’t need to be Baldur’s Gate II and have 100+ hours of potential playtime, but come on.

PS: I guess no one on the XBox completed New Vegas because of the crashing issues?Heh.

absalom said : and if two or three of those hours are backtracking across the same maps?

I think this is really the issue — not short or long games in and of themselves, but how the length of a game balances against the quality and variety it provides. I sunk upwards of 100 hours into Borderlands (+Expansions) and it never felt old — there was always some new interesting thing happening. I got through about ten hours of Assassin’s Creed (the first one) before it felt repetitious (“Go and do this mini-game. Now go and do this mini-game in a slightly different setting.”)

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